"There's that," says Amariah, "although it's not - I'm not sure. I can think of key events but they're not timed right to be causative instead of just emblematic. Like, I know I'm intensely important to my sweeties - they separated to save Path, to a first approximation humans just don't do that..." She taps her chin. "...It could have to do with my parents. They're still together and they shouldn't be, everybody else is divided between divorced and happily married. Maybe I have something un-standard installed about lack of - relationship freedom."
"My mother's a witch like me, and witches in general are keenly aware of human partner mortality. As long as Ranata likes Charlie, she can't bear to leave him, because then he'd die at some point without her - I don't even have my afterlife figured out yet so I can't reassure her on that - and she'd never have the chance to change her mind. I don't have this problem because I have pretty much always considered the correct solution to be to research immortality. Which I successfully did even before getting minted."
"I am awesome! So, maybe that's why I'm off-baseline on comfort-with-poly? It's not even just a matter of whether I need to mindread my sweeties to know they love me - I also sleep around more than a standard Bell, I need to give Cam a spin one of these days, I have this habit now of testing boys out for the rest of us. And that has nothing to do with reading anybody's mind, it's just fun and I see zero benefit to choosing not to have that kind of fun." Amariah nibbles her lip. "I wonder if you'd get much mileage out of talking to Golden. She's got to have some model of us in her head; she can't pull it off because, vampire, monogamous-as-hell husband, etcetera, but she's got a monogamous Bell's perspective on the poly ones."
"Goddesses all! You haven't even been to the Belltower, have you, you've never left this world, you don't have a Janegem - we need some kind of checklist," mutters Amariah. "Jane, the book, please?" The Bellbook appears before her and Amariah catches it out of the air and hands it over.
"Brilliance is shaped like you when he's being a human, but he's also a deck of cards and a staff thingamabob sometimes," says Aurora, "and he was made by some people, who were seriously shitty, to have a lot of magic and destroy planets with it, which he was not on board with. And he attaches to a sorceress - me - in some way that I do not fully understand, but we have some magic privilege sorts of things with each other, like, this classy dress I'm wearing, that's a thing devices do is outfits. Not wardrobes, just specific magical-girl-type outfits called Barrier Jackets and this is mine." She tilts her head. "He sort of is also the Barrier Jacket, but not in a lot of detail, he said." But she pets the material of her skirt anyway.
"Do you usually have to spend four hundred years hopping around the universe in deck-of-cards form unable to pay significant attention to anything but not blowing up whatever planet you're visiting because you've got a control program installed after having only coincidentally escaped attempts at torturing you into being an obedient weapon? Or, not that exactly, but I was really hoping that was worse than the usual, because it's bad."
"For reference, we think Shell Bell's got the lousiest history of us, I think that holds even versus Sarion, but Sarion's competitive, so's Golden for a bit of it, but Sarion's got a trickier fix ahead of her and Golden was patched as soon as she found out her husband was alive, everybody else has had lesser or briefer shit happen to us. You?"
"We're probably a little ahead of the pack, actually," Petaal points out, and Kas nods.
"But Queenie might be ahead by more, after that thing with Voice."
"Voice is the one who got Shell Bell," Amariah explains. "That template is - we're not sure about it, or at least there's no consensus. It's a Joker's-little-brother template, cropped up three times, Beast has one and Queenie's is Voice and Micaiah has one. Angela got Micaiah's little brother out young, though, she thinks he'll turn out all right. But he does not get to be in a room with Shell Bell."
"There was a period when we were twelve when she pretty much wallpapered our room with art of unicorns," says Aurora. "I'm not particularly surprised. Anyway, Golden," and she summarizes her quandary yet again. "And Amariah thought I might want to talk to you just to figure out how you're modeling all the poly Bells."
"It's an imperfect difference. Stella's Alice is a vampire; I'm not sure if it's his ingot power or sheer template attractor that leaves him capable of non-monogamy while mated. The literal original succubi who mated settled down when it happened and it doesn't seem to have affected Alice at all. But for the most part, vampires acquire mates and then no one else interests us."
"Not exactly. Cam is the one Bell besides myself my husband can tolerate being around for any length of time. He finds the others unsettlingly like me while not being me, and has comparable problems with the fact that they are dating people who do not stand in a similar relationship to him. To be fair, Edward is not particularly popular with the other Bells or their loved ones either. Or did you mean me?"
"While I can logically appreciate that if I had never met Edward, and if I were not a vampire and therefore subject to various features of vampire psychology, I would most likely not have been alone forever, it's somewhat difficult emotionally to observe eleven might-have-beens not one of whom comes home to anything like my husband."
"It would be different if we were all dating unique people. It wasn't so bad when Stella was the only alt I knew about, although her Alice did not make a particularly good first impression. I'm the only one with a unique person, until and unless Pattern picks up someone who doesn't match," says Golden, shrugging.
"Yes, Lexi, sometime you can visit Thilanushinyel and see if any herds of unicorns want you to frolic amongst them and be fitted for flower garlands. Meanwhile, um. Okay. So, a majority of people - at least humans - are only interested in having sex with people who are not their same gender. Some people don't care either way, some people are only interested in people who are their same gender, some people don't want to have sex with anyone even after they grow up, and this is all complicated by the fact that gender is only usually a one-or-the-other thing."
"And I pretty much expect at this point to hear, 'But I don't know how much help I'll be, because I had a special circumstance that isn't like anyone else's special circumstance yet still made it particularly natural for me to fall into that pattern'," says Aurora, sighing.
"Well, that's not exactly what I was going to say, but I did start out particularly motivated and with a general understanding of Edori habits. Though I believe many Edori are faithful to single lovers while they have them, it's not the norm, and they don't generally marry."
"Yes - not only did I expect that Micaiah had been chosen for me by someone smarter and better than myself," Angela snorts ruefully, "I also found that he'd be my requisite partner if I ever wanted to be Archangel. I later learned differently, but not before I was thoroughly attached by other means."
"Phebe is another angel at the Eyrie who doesn't like me," Angela explains to Aurora, settling her wing more snugly around Micaiah. "She interpreted Micaiah's - availability - as an opportunity to hurt me. And for political reasons I can't just announce to everyone that it isn't. Angels are often inconstant, but associated mortals, not so much. She believes that I forgave him for a betrayal, and her too, and I managed to present this in a way that so far doesn't have her telling the tale far and wide."
"My question is more about why it isn't a betrayal. I mean, maybe he never promised not to, that takes care of the technical sense of betrayal, but - you guys are married, you're going to have a baby, and you're not - keeping yourselves to yourselves. I don't completely get it."
Stella kisses Alice's cheek. "Sorry," she says, and it's not clear which of them she's addressing. "You'd think being able to read his mind would've done it, and it did, mostly, it jollied me along for months, I probably could've done with nothing but if I'd had to."
"...no, hang on," he says, "didn't you say you didn't make me a vampire so I'd be in magical vampire love with you forever?"
But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? He loves her, and he can't ever stop doing that, and that is something she made happen on purpose, and when he asked her if that was why she made him think it wasn't, but then it turned out to be part of it after all.
[I think I freaked out Aurora. I think she's glad she heard that story because it means she's got fair warning against turning into me. I don't like that. I don't like that you might want to stop being a vampire specifically because you don't like the bond effect as opposed to any of the other effects.]
[Okay, um. I am pretty good at having many reasons for doing things. And things that aren't exactly reasons but are positive features of the decision, or negative features of the alternatives, that I note. If the only facts of the situation had been that you would like turning into a vampire and I could be sure that you weren't going to wind up mated to anyone who wasn't me, then that would've, honestly, I swear, sufficed to induce me to turn you, if it had occurred to me. But yes, the reason the thought entered my head was because I wanted to be surer than I was that I could trust you, and that wasn't even all for personal relationship reasons even though that was there what with all the conversations we kept having about how you couldn't be sure you weren't going to fall for someone else as hard and suddenly as you did for me. We had only recently met the Joker and I did not get along with him and I didn't have Mary repeatedly explaining to me about how harmless Jokers with coins are or nearly a dozen other examples of the template telling me how harmless Jokers with Bells are. All I had to go on was you and him and the idea of you turning into what I knew of him made me sick and Golden was so completely secure. She knows like she knows arithmetic that she has Edward forever and always so long as they both shall live. His actual personality might not be my cup of tea, but you, you I love, and all I knew was that I had you as long as your brain didn't do anything else sudden and unexpected like it had already been shown to do. When you fell for me. Or anything unpleasant. When the Joker - existed.]
He doesn't like feeling like Stella wants fucked up things, but the fact remains, those were some pretty fucked up reasons for wanting to turn him. And he's glad he knows what they are, now, and glad she's not trying to tell him they're not fucked up, but it still doesn't feel resolved. He doesn't really know what he wants. Maybe he wants Stella not to want fucked up things, but she's still Stella and he still loves her, fucked up things and all. He doesn't want to change who she is to make himself feel better; that seems like a bad, and also terribly ironic, solution.
It takes him a few tries, about thirty stars' worth, but he manages an evil in the end. He uses an existing star to declaw the new ones - ever since the Jokers were let in on the secret, some of them have taken to carrying all their coins declawed, even the hexes - and then uses one of those to declaw the evil.
Then he designs the wish.
He wants to stop being a vampire. He can get rid of his also-permanent air filter while he's at it. He should also be immune to vampire venom, because it seems not-impossible that he might want to get bit at some point; he'll take the Joker's version of immunity, which is linked to his regeneration and therefore hurts a lot, that's always fun.
He can go either way on the brainspace available to vampires, but the depth of emotional processing - he's keeping that, in some other form that won't lead to him still having a mate bond by accident. He bets his power will help sort that one out. He wonders what Lazarus would say about its attitude to his mate bond now. They are probably not snuggling so happily anymore.
Is that it? He thinks that's it.
He comes back human-shaped and human-brained, although a somewhat bigger human brain than most, and bigger in unusual directions. It's a good shape for his mind to be. He likes it.
And he still loves her, just like he knew he would, but now loving her doesn't hurt anymore. It doesn't feel like something that was forced on him. It's all his, all him, all real.
He loves her a lot.
[I love you,] he says, and designs himself vampire-level supersenses to work with his human body, and uses one of his new declawed evils to both implement them and add them into his torching template.
Mmmmmmm, snuggles. Also, kisses. They should definitely be kissing right now.